I got an email from Irdeto today, the cybersecurity specialist that recently acquired Denuvo. And, naturally, I wanted to share it with you all. The pair of them have been doing a little data tracking you see. It’s all in an effort to show the world the great service Denuvo is offering to games publishers and just how much money could be lost if they don’t use Denuvo Anti-Tamper DRM.

It’s quite a lot of money, as it turns out. Irdeto tracked the downloads for the first fortnight on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks of a major sports title that launched without anti-tamper protection. Irdeto detected 355,664 torrent downloads of the game by pirates. At full retail value, they pin the “total potential loss of revenue from P2P downloads at $21,336,283.”

Just over $21 million worth of copies of this sports title were downloaded illegally during its first two weeks on sale. Sadly, Irdeto hasn’t named the game but considering all EA Sports titles plus PES 2019 use Denuvo, it doesn’t exactly leave us with many ‘major sports titles’ to pick from. Basically, we’re sideways glancing at NBA 2K19 real hard right now.

Irdeto and Denuvo pinpoint the two-week launch period as the most critical part of any game’s sales success. Up to 80% of total sales often take place in this launch period, with 50% in the first four days alone.

“Piracy is a threat that is firmly established in the games industry and, as our research suggests, it can result in potentially huge revenue losses for publishers if their games are compromised within the 14-day window following release,” said Reinhard Blaukovitsch, managing director of Denuvo, Irdeto. “With this in mind, it is crucial for publishers to implement security strategies that make their games as difficult as possible to crack and reverse engineer. This way they will be able to better protect the revenues that allow them to continue to create such compelling games.”

There are, naturally, some major provisos attached to this statement. First of all, Irdeto is operating under the assumption that all 355,664 pirates would’ve gone out and bought a copy of the ‘sports game’ if it wasn’t available on torrent networks. Here’s the thing - pirates are pirating because they either don’t want to, or literally cannot, spend the money on a game. A few will trot out the tired ‘I was demoing it’ line, an excuse which holds about as much water as a rusty colander when Steam lets us trial literally any game for up to two hours. The vast majority of these pirates were never going to buy the game, this isn’t $21 million lost. NBA 2K18 was cracked on launch day last year and it was still the bestselling sports game of 2017.

The second issue is that Irdeto itself doesn’t even reliably protect games during those first two weeks on sale. Football Manager 2019 was cracked after 4 days. Two Point Hospital was cracked on launch day. Shadow of War, FIFA 18 and Total War: Warhammer 2 lasted under a day. If those first 14 days really are so crucial, it seems odd Two Point Hospital, a fairly innocuous management sim, is still riding high up the Steam charts three months after launch. The flipside is games like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Dragon Ball FighterZ. The former has yet to be cracked while the latter took almost half a year. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, publishers are taking a big gamble on its implementation.

But it has to be said, Irdeto/Denuvo is an impossible position. It offers a service that publishers could want, but it’s impossible to provide concrete as to whether DRM affects game sales, either positively or negatively.

What do you think the real cost of piracy is? Do you believe games can suffer more in lost sales from implementing Denuvo than they do from piracy? Get your pitchforks out below!

Most of those downloads are from people who wasnt gonnna pay for the game in the first place so i doubt they are loosing too much money, i mean this is a console game, that tons of people blindly buy every single sport game that comes each year.

This is stupid. Suppose, NBA2K19 had Denuvo or something, would it convince those 350,000 people to buy the game? Why don't they boast about the stats which show how many potential customers refuse to buy a game on finding out it has Denuvo?

to be totally honest, I don't think it's many for both sides of the equation. Pirates would probably never buy the game and the number of people actively not buying games because they have denuvo is a comparatively tiny bubble outside of pirates who are just annoyed they can't play a game. Most people who just buy and play games just don't think about that stuff

It would have cost them a lot more if they had Denuvo on it as paying customers would have stayed away altogether.This is just scare tactics. Ask them how much they made by not having Denuvo on it. And then let's compare apples to apples.

What a load… Those people who downloaded weren't going to pay for it anyway! There dicks just look at the downloads, multiply that number by the full price of the game and get that figure, then say "oh noes, look at all the lost monies! Buy Denuvo now!!!", whereas in reality people who were gonna buy the game - bought it. All that happened is that more people ended up playing than otherwise would have.Independent studies have also shown that the extra people playing the game via piracy end up boosting sales because of all the extra content and word-of-mouth about the game.Stupid anti-piracy idiots… The lies and false promises are almost as bad as those about religion…

when you say sports games are the same every year what point are you really making ?? have they started dropping med kits in real life football? or players have been parachuting onto the pitch? nothing has changed in real life sports so what changes are you expecting in the game really?

Nothing, that's the point. There is no reason to re-release effectively the same game every year with only changes being minor adjustments and rooster updates. Well no reason apart from one. I'll let you guess which one that is.All of those small adjustments and changes could very well be updates to the game, but why update when you can charge 60$ for it, right.

A modern football/basketball/whatever game with a custom team builder and/or mod support would pretty much render future releases of such a game obsolete. The only things that change are what…players and sponsors. Amazing…I too do not know why the F would anyone keep buying that drivel year on year.

All this tells me is that you don't actually understand how they change from year to year. I can't speak to NBA, or just about any sports games outside of FIFA and PES, tbh, but they offer markedly different gameplay experiences each time for anyone that actually plays them. I would certainly not want them to be a single game that never changes outside of roster updates, that would get pretty stale.

And to Xquatrox, it's really not that much different to blowing your load on £1200 GPUs, something which you've always vehemently defended (as have I). £40 is comparatively nothing for a lot of people to play a game week in, week out, for an entire year. If they see the value, where's the problem?

I pirated Persona 5 last month just to see how far PS3 emulation went and then deleted everything, so with their logic: if the game was denuvo protected they actually think I would have forked over 300+ for a PS4 and another 60+ for the game itself? are they MENTAL?! get out of here with your BS! and as IF i'm going to believe anything that comes out of EA's mouth!